11/22/2003

Beyond Democracy in Virtual Worlds

I keep up with virtual worlds at Terra Nova. And I often forget that these are games. But as the links in this post on Celia Pearce reveal, games are serious academic business, as well as being highly profitable. My sense of things is that virtual worlds, immersive games, whatever they're termed, are the precursors to online environments in which much of what's now done going from site to site will be done in a specific world, kind of like in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

The question of whether these games are worlds or services or something else has been a point of discussion at Terra Nova. While the various philosophical arguments on these and related issues ensue, they really are mostly pointless except to those who participate in them. The comments related to legal issues are most relevant, because the courts are where most of such philosophical questions will be resolved. I find it disturbing that Dan Hunter thinks that many of his colleagues would argue against the relevance of participatory democracy in online settings.

My own perspective as an anarchist, is that whoever is affected directly by things should have input into those things. While that perspective would get more complex as one got into specifics, it does entail the belief that an institution or service that involves large numbers of people should ultimately involve the decision making of those people. I say this is a belief because I don't believe in rights as a natural phenomenon. Rights are something we make happen and they can disappear all too easily, natural or not.

One of the problems with future legal decisions regarding online worlds is that they will be based on legal perspectives established in less than fully democratic societies, since participatory democracy exists nowhere at a state level. Which raises the point made by a friend, that it's time to create an open source virtual world in which to build an online anarchist society. If that's happening and your collective agreements don't currently require secrecy, please let me know. I'm interested and so are many others.

PS - My use of the term anarchy bears little resemblance to that of Anarchy Online or Evercrack in its bloodier moments.

Game Studies

If you're addicted to computer games and need a dissertation topic, Game Studies, the international journal of computer game research, may provide appropriate food for thought. Looks like the last issue came out last May. Sure, they publish "several times a year," but I'd archive it on your hard drive, just in case.

11/17/2003

Domain Errors

Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices is an interesting looking book from subRosa, a "reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women's bodies, lives, and work." Reviewer Ryan Griffis describes it as taking on the "task of theorizing as well as documenting what feminism could look like in the Information Age."

11/11/2003

CASPIAN's Confusing Campaign Against RFID

I just got a periodic newsletter from CASPIAN or Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering that informed me of the recent Chicago Sun-Times expose of Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble's secret testing of RFID chips allied with webcams to track shoppers' response to cosmetics. These were tests that I think were originally announced or exposed then officially abandoned due to negative publicity. Apparently they occurred anyway.

RFID chips have been publicized by businesses that want to use them as an innocuous form of inventory tracking and control. Their innocence supposedly lies in the limits of the technology and the fact that they can only be tracked at close range. However, with the amazing leaps that can occur in the development of such technologies, these limits are hardly comforting. If you're concerned about such issues, CASPIAN has set up a new site, Stop RFID.

CASPIAN is an interesting project for various reasons and they are addressing important issues, but they are pursuing a confusing Internet strategy that involves starting new websites for each campaign, often related to the same issue. So they also are responsible for Boycott Bennetton, a campaign against RFID chips at Bennetton stores, and Boycott Gillette, same technology, different company. Typically such single campaign sites are used when multiple groups form a coalition or for a major ongoing campaign. These proliferating sites, all from the same group, mostly on the same issue, make it difficult to follow what is basically an interconnected campaign.

I also find it rather odd that they use stoprfid.com, stoprfid.org and spychips.com for the same site, an approach primarily employed by disreputable marketers seeking to spam the search engines. It's all rather confusing, especially since there doesn't seem to be a links list at their first site to all the others.

9/11 Changed Everything

11/07/2003

News Briefs: Schools/Suicide/Assassins

I have long heard of the high rate of youth suicide in Japan, partially linked to pressures to achieve in high stakes exams in their educational system. There's a lot to that topic but it's my basic reference for those who look to such authoritarian educational systems for inspiration. However I had no idea that there is a growing rate of teacher suicides in Japan, as well.

My interest in education ranges far beyond the typical institutions one may envision when discussing education. While I've been drawn more to alternative educational projects, it's important to recognize that oppressive forces have their own forms of education, and I don't just mean Harvard.

News Briefs: White House Robots.txt

I've been seeing various articles and posts about the recent discovery that the White House is using robots.txt to exclude various search engine spiders at whitehouse.gov. Knowing the tendency of anarchists and left/liberals to jump to conclusions without understanding the underlying technical details, I found this article at SearchEngineWatch.com quite useful. But then I found this post at Shock and Awe that seems to account for the prior technical explanation. This looks like a good topic for someone to research while older versions of things are still available online.

11/06/2003

Online Journal

Check out First Monday sometime if you're interested in academic takes on the Internet, cyberculture and that sort of thing. They publish smart writing by smart people who are unrelentingly academic. I'd be like that too if I'd gotten a higher ed job!

11/04/2003

Blog Alert

When logging on to Blogger, I always check out who's posted recently. Often I check out the blogs with provocative titles, like Nymphomania or Narcolepsy?. Like a surprising number of blogs with sexually oriented titles, this one is written by a young American woman. However, unlike most such blogs I've checked out, this blogger is developing a personal voice that excels when describing her visits to a local coffeehouse or her theatrical outbursts at parties. More focused is her collaboration with a friend called Modern Art Failure. Quite interesting and well done. These two blogs remind me that I don't write about sex or art nearly enough in this blog.

More on Elsevier Boycott

OK, it's not a boycott yet, it's a proposed boycott. I finally got it straight from this article that I found out about, of course, at Open Access News. This article is especially good because it's lays out numbers, both what the journals cost and the amount of involvement in Elsevier business by unpaid researchers in the University of California system.